Loading ...At the National Tea Party Convention held in Nashville, Tennessee this weekend, leaders in this movement sought to turn the fringe group into a serious political force by fostering white racial resentment and suggesting a return to the Jim Crow days of literacy tests for voters. Several news commentators, including Rachel Maddow at MSNBC (opens video) and Rich Benjamin at Alternet, have commented on the racial subtext of the Tea Party Movement, and there’s building evidence of this based on the recent convention.
Tom Tancredo, former Representative (R-Colorado), was the initial speaker at the convention. Addressing the overwhelmingly white crowd, Tancredo said, “It is our nation.” Tancredo repeatedly referred to President Obama by his middle name, Hussein, and said he was thankful Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona lost the 2008 presidential election because Obama has mobilized an uprising. “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,” he said. The kinds of literacy tests Tancredo suggests were once used in the U.S. under Jim Crow to keep blacks from voting. These racist laws were overturned with the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965.
The big news story out of the convention was, of course, the keynote speech by Sarah Palin. Rich Benjamin is spot on when he writes in his analysis of Palin:
“Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through. Deciphering the racial codes on the movement’s ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president’s face and a caption: ‘Undocumented worker.’ Another combines Obama’s image with this caption: ‘The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!’ Aside from the festive, ad hominem attacks against President Obama, the Tea Party’s leaders and its rank-and-file rarely mention race in debate, instead tucking it just under the surface of ‘nonracial’ issues like health care reform, public spending, immigration, and pointedly, taxes.”
There is evidence that these sorts of subtle racial cues matter in political elections. A study by researchers Valentino, Hutchings and White published in American Political Science Review (2002), 96:1:75-90, suggests that subtle racial cues in campaign communications may activate racial attitudes, thus altering political decision making. In an experiment, they tested whether subtle racial cues embedded in political advertisements prime racial attitudes as predictors of candidate preference by making them more accessible in memory. Results show that a wide range of implicit race cues can prime racial attitudes.
Such research lends support to the critiques by news analysts on the Tea Party Movement’s attempts to gain political support by fostering white racial resentment.
Boston Cop Fired for Racial Slur in Email
By · CommentsBoston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said Officer Justin Barrett was fired yesterday for violating department rules when he sent the e-mail on July 22, 2009. In the email, Barrett called Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “jungle monkey.” The email was sent following the incident in Cambridge last summer when Prof. Gates was arrested in his own home on a disorderly conduct charge. “(Gates’) first priority should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a … jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance,” the e-mail said.
Barrett, for his part, said at the time, “I am not a racist.” Barrett sent the email to several individuals and to the Boston Globe. He went on to explain, saying, “It was a poor choice of words. I did not mean to offend anyone.”
No doubt some will argue that Barrett’s “right free speech” has been violated with this decision, but from my perspective it seems like an appropriate step on the part of the Boston Police Department, and a step in the right direction for those interested in equal protection under the law.
Racism and Health: Henrietta Lacks Revisited
By · CommentsThe life of Henrietta Lacks is the subject of a new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Ms. Lacks is a notable historical figure for her unwitting “donation” of her cells to scientific study. David Strohecker wrote about Ms. Lacks’ here back in October, around the 50th anniversary of her death from cervical cancer. Dwight Garner gives Skloot’s new book a rave review in The New York Times (hat tip: Jessica in Austin), and here’s a longish clip from that review:
“The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms. Skloot writes, ‘trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.’ Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times.
Because HeLa cells reproduced with what the author calls a ‘mythological intensity,’ they could be used in test after test. ‘They helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,’ Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity.
Bought and sold and shipped around the world for decades, HeLa cells are famous to science students everywhere. But little has been known, until now, about the unwitting donor of these cells. Mrs. Lacks’s own family did not know that her cells had become famous (and that people had grown wealthy from marketing them) until more than two decades after her death, after scientists had begun to take blood from her surviving family members, without their informed consent, in order to better study HeLa.
Ms. Skloot tells the story of Mrs. Lacks’s life, from those tobacco fields in small-town Clover, Va., to the ‘colored’ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the 1950s, where she was treated for her cancer, and where her cells were harvested. She follows the members of Mrs. Lacks’s family to East Baltimore, where many of them live today, still struggling with her complicated legacy. As one of Mrs. Lacks’s sons says: ‘She’s the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?‘
…
Ms. Skloot writes with particular sensitivity and grace about the history of race and medicine in America. Black oral history, she points out, is full of stories about ‘night doctors,’ men who could pluck black patients off the streets to experiment on their bodies. There was some truth behind those tales.”
While I’m glad that Ms. Lacks’ story is getting the attention it deserves in this new book, it would be mistake to regard this compelling narrative as an anomaly in U.S. history. Rather, the experience of Ms. Lacks and her descendants is in many ways an archetypal story about racism and health in the U.S., as Harriet Washington documents in her thoroughly researched book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
Russian Neo-Nazis Killed 71 in Racist Attacks in 2009
By · CommentsRacist neo-Nazis in Russia killed 71 people in 2009, according to reports from Sky News (h/t: Hope not Hate). A group known as “Slavic Union,” is intent on eliminating anyone who appears to be “non-Russian” from Russia, including through violent attacks. A leader of the group, Dmitry Dyomushkin, says that he is interested in cultivating a “respectable image” for himself and the group, claiming that 60% of Russian citizens support the groups’ goals. However, he asserts that “even with this majority we are not allowed to be part of the political process because the government has squeezed out opposition.The whole new generation of Russians are nationalists – our influence on young people is very strong.” This short video clip (3:16) about the group is chilling:
This news story also mentions that the neo-Nazi group has made digital videos of their attacks on immigrants and posted them online. Despite this bold move, no one has been arrested in this attack. This form of cyber racism, which seems to be characteristic of Russian neo-nazis, is one that I highlighted a couple of years ago on this blog. In 2007, CurrentTV featured a story called “From Russia with Hate,” about neo-nazis in Russia who are filming racist attacks on immigrants, then posting these digital videos online.
The rise of neo-Nazi violence in Russia, and the use of digital video to publicize their racist violence, is an alarming trend that warrants our attention.
Ethnicity and Violence in Africa: An Update
By · CommentsAt last count, the clashes that erupted on January 17 2010 in Jos (capital of Plateau State in Nigeria), had claimed the lives of about 360 people and displaced over 20,000 families as told by officials. This incident of cultural conflict in Nigeria represents the latest in the chronic antagonism between Muslims and Christians. In these parts, there is great overlap between ‘ethnicity’ signifying cultural characteristics or traits and religious identification so that one’s religion may be a descriptor of one’s ethnicity. The recent spate of killings in Jos has occurred between Christians, who are largely non-Hausa, and Muslims who are predominantly of the Hausa ethnic group.
I recall several weeks ago as these ethno-religious killings were going in Jos that I took my aged wagon to a local franchise auto shop for a routine check-up. The mechanic working on my car must’ve detected an accent when I spoke, so he asked me: “Where are you from,” and in my attempt to deflect this line of questioning, I retorted: ‘Baltimore!” He said, “Really, where are you from? You’re from Africa? Where?” To which I answered: “Does it make a difference?” “Yes, it does, to me,” he shot back. He was insistent and he kept at it: “So, where are you from?” Finally, I gave in and told him where I was born. But, the mechanic was not done – he wanted to know which ethnic group, which tribe, I belonged to. I was becoming impatient with this conversation about my birthplace and ethnicity. I asked him: “What do you care, which tribe I belong to?” I was being direct so he could drop the topic, but he won’t let it drop; “It matters, he said.” I was incredulous, so I asked him: “How does it matter?” His best come back was: “I just want to know!” So, I finally yielded and told him which ethnic group I belonged to – I figured that if this gentleman was going to work on my car, I didn’t want to antagonize him. He then told me where he was born (I had figured as much) and then he proclaimed his ethnicity, although I hadn’t asked him and really didn’t care to know.
As I left the shop, I realized I wasn’t completely surprised by this exchange. In our presentation of self as black immigrants, we rely on cultural and other descriptors to signify who we are. For most African immigrants, calling up one’s tribe or ethnicity is a way of overcoming the master status based on phenotype. We want to be more than just ‘black.’ The exchange I had at the auto shop brought into focus the continuing relevance of ethnic identity and its role in inter-communal conflict in Africa. But the bearing of ethnic identity is not the same for the immigrant black and the indigene in Africa.
As I reviewed the latest data on ethnic identification in Africa from the AfroBarometer Round 4 Surveys, my focus, as I’ve noted in previous posts here, was on the extent to which ethnic identity becomes the basis for inter-communal conflict. In my earlier posts, I have presented data tracking ethnocentrism and conflict in Africa. In this post, I provide updates on the prevalence of ethnic identity from recent survey data collected by AfroBarometer in 2008.
Round 4 of the AfroBarometer Surveys were conducted in 18 countries in 2008, drawing a sample of 26,414 respondents with proportionate representation to capture the distribution of ethnic diversity in each of these countries. I culled published summary data on five core items that track the intensity of ethnic identification: these data are based on responses to the following questions: (1) I feel only ‘ethnic’ (respondent’s ethnic group). (2) I feel more ‘ethnic’ than ‘national’ (respondent’s nationality). (3) I feel equally ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’. (4) I feel more ‘national’ than ‘ethnic’. (5) I feel only ‘national.’ The root question for this set of items is: “What is your tribe or ethnic group?’
I collapsed these data by combing question items 1 and 2 to depict “strong ethnic identification” and combined items 4 and 5 to depict “strong national identification.” I then sorted the data in descending order based on the percentage of respondents (in each country) that responded to the combined item: “strong national identification”.
These survey data tell us about the prevalence of ethnic identification and national identity in these African countries. My contention was that more respondents would choose ethnic identity. My other contention was that data for Nigeria, with its sporadic incidents of ethno-religious conflicts, would show a high prevalence of strong ethnic identification. The data are presented below:
So, what do these data tell? In Tanzania (78%), Madagascar (67%) and Senegal (56%), more respondents relied on their nationality as a descriptor than in any other surveyed countries. The prevalence of ethnic identification (and ethnic attachment) in these countries is low. On the other hand, Malawi is the only country with more than half of its respondents identifying primarily with their ethnic group. When we compare the proportions for the item “I feel equally ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’,” more Liberians (65%) followed by Ghanaians (57%) and Ugandans (53%) report feeling equally ethnic and nationalistic. Slightly less than half of surveyed Nigerians (45%) report this sentiment. Overall, more respondents in most countries chose “strong national identification” or “equally ethnic and national.”
My contention that more Nigerians would choose ethnic identification also did not bear out – and this is propitious. Nigerians are comparatively no different from most of the other Africans surveyed in terms of their feelings about ethnic identity. So, it is puzzling how community misunderstandings devolve into such violent acts of killings and maiming in Nigeria (or more precisely, some parts of Nigeria). Some reports have argued that the recent troubles in Jos were perpetuated by thugs and fuelled by social disadvantage. If this is indeed the case, where were the officers of peace who are responsible for diffusing tensions and maintaining order? The killings went unabated for several hours before the military was called in to restore order. Perhaps the trajectory of these violent incidents reveals a certain level of state weakness in its inability to quell mob behavior?
These data are encouraging and may exhort us to think that ethnocentrism is on the wane in Africa. But we cannot forget what extreme ethnic identification and attachment has wrought in the past decade: brutal killings in Rwanda, ethnic war that convulsed Ethiopians and Eritrea, civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, ethnic violence that threatened to divide Cote d’Ivoire, ethnic war that has ravaged Sudanese in the South, sporadic ethnic killings that occur in Northern Ghana between Kokomba and Nanumba ethnic groups, ethno-religious violence in Nigeria, violent separatist movement in Southern region of Casamance in Senegal, the wars in the Congo Democratic Republic and Angola.
In Angola, two officials of the Togolese national soccer team were killed and the reserve goalie was seriously wounded in the Cabinda region during the Conference of African Football (CAF) tournament that just ended in January 2010. The bus in which the Togolese were riding was shot at by Cabinda separatists. The cause for the violent separatist movement in Cabinda is a certain ethno-cultural distinctiveness.
New Documentary: “Herskovitz at the Heart of Blackness”
By · CommentsThere is a new documentary by Lewellyn Smith, Vincent Brown and Christine Herbes-Sommers, that should be of interest to scholars and students who want to learn about the early, anthropological study of race. The film takes a look at the career of Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering Jewish American anthropologist of African Studies and controversial intellectual who established the first African Studies Center at an American university and authored, “The Myth of the Negro Past.” The filmmakers weave together a nuanced discussion of Jewish exile and immigration along with African and African American culture and identity. Here’s a short (3:15) clip:
The film is a co-production of Vital Pictures and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), Executive Producer for ITVS Sally Jo Fifer, and is distributed by California Newsreel. It’s 57 minutes long, so it’s a good length for use in the classroom. Really fascinating, highly recommended.
There is some fascinating research being done these days with mapping and the visual representation of data, some of it illustrates the reality of incarceration as the new form of Jim Crow segregation.
Currently, the U.S. has more than 2 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons. A disproportionate of these come from a handful of neighborhoods, and in many places the concentration of incarceration rates is so dense that some states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to lock up the residents of single city blocks. A lack of opportunity in the legitimate economic structure, combined with more opportunities in the unofficial economy, and the aggressive police state practices that Joe mentioned yesterday, fairly guarantees high reincarceration rates. In fact, roughly forty percent of those who are released and reenter their communities do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated. These “million dollar blocks” are almost exclusively also blocks where African American and Latino people live.
(Image of Brooklyn, NY from Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University.)
Blogger Julie Netherland notes the staggering public health costs of such policies, then poses the relevant question here: “how could we improve the health of these neighborhoods if we invested a million dollars into community development, jobs, or education … instead of incarceration? How many public health problems could be solved?” Indeed, I suspect the health of these “million dollar blocks” would look a lot different if we could shift the focus from incarceration to community development.
This systemic pattern of incarcerating black and brown young men from a few city blocks is a continuation of decades of social, political and cultural exclusion based on race. Legal scholar and litigator Michelle Alexander has a new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which she argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Her work shows that by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.
So, while it is important to celebrate the victories over Jim Crow won at lunch counters, it is imperative that we look for ways to dismantle the current, pernicious system of Jim Crow segregation.
Bob Herbert at the Times has some very revealing statistics on police harassment and malpractice in New York City:
Statistics will be out shortly about the total number of people who were stopped and frisked by the police in 2009. We already have the data for the first three-quarters of the year, and they are staggering. During that period, more than 450,000 people were stopped by the cops, an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2008.
Likely more than half a million in one year. He adds:
An overwhelming 84 percent of the stops in the first three-quarters of 2009 were of black or Hispanic New Yorkers. It is incredible how few of the stops yielded any law enforcement benefit. Contraband, which usually means drugs, was found in only 1.6 percent of the stops of black New Yorkers. For Hispanics, it was just 1.5 percent. For whites, who are stopped far less frequently, contraband was found 2.2 percent of the time.
Racial discrimination and little open protest or concern with extreme police malpractice. Welcome to lockdown America? And much of this is also a waste of police time:
The percentages of stops that yielded weapons were even smaller. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites. Only about 6 percent of stops result in an arrest for any reason.
Notice too that whites were the more likely to carry weapons and have drugs. I wonder why that does not get news headlines? Why don’t they stop more whites, as there would be more payoff?
As I have mentioned here before police brutality and other malpractice is a severe problem nationally:
Lest some think that we are ignoring lots of white victims of police brutality here, we might note that one social science study back in the 1990s analyzed 130 police-brutality accounts in several cities across the country. In that reviews of cases, criminologist Kim Lersch discovered that the targets of this type of police malpractice are almost always black or Latino. The latter made up 97 percent of the victims of police brutality, while the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of officers involved were white. Police brutality overwhelmingly involves white-on-black or other white-on-minority violence. (See full discussion in Chapter 5 here.)
February: Celebrating Black History
By · CommentsFebruary – the shortest month of the year – marks the beginning of black history month in the U.S. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. If you’re not familiar with this important history, this short (6:11) video clip from the History Channel provides a basic review of the facts:
Today is also significant for the opening of a Civil Rights Museum on the site of the sit-ins in Greensboro. While the courage of people like the four young, African-American men that sat at that segregated lunch counter helped change the system of Jim Crow segregation, we should not let the civil rights struggle become ossified in memorials and museums. The truest celebration of black history month is to continue the struggle for racial equality now.
Not So Post-Racial After All
By · CommentsSo, while white liberals like Chris Matthews blather on about how post-racial we all are now with a black president, other folks are not so post-racial after all. Allen McDuffee sent me this disturbing image circulating via a Facebook group dedicated to denigrating Haitians and the earthquake relief effort. While it appears that Facebook has pulled the group once already for violating the Terms of Service (TOS), the group is back and loudly proclaiming its alleged protection under the First Amendment and threatening to contact the ACLU to defend it.
There is no constitutionally protecting right to have a racist group on Facebook. And, given the threat to the president implied by the image linked above, I’m surprised that those who are generating such an image are not under investigation by the Secret Service.
As I’ve said here before, it’s certainly possible to disagree with the policies of President Obama and not be a racist, there is something about linking the threat to Obama with the vitriolic hatred of Haitian people which suggests not only a criticism of Obama’s presidency, or lack of empathy for earthquake victims but a deep well of racist antipathy as well. I guess we’re not so post-racial after all.
